Just a quick one, because I spent the late afternoon writing the Trondheim post.
The trip to Helsinki was uneventful, with one interesting wrinkle: having reached Helsinki airport I asked Google how to get to the hotel by public transport and it gave every indication of not even knowing of the existence of the airport train service, which leaves from the station below the airport every ten minutes or so. It’s best public transport recommendation was some combination of busses and trains that took well over an hour. The direct train to central station took about 30 minutes. So it’s not just the search results that are degrading…
When we got to the hotel and onto the internet we checked the restaurant booking and discovered a slight miscalculation: the one we thought was this evening was tomorrow (Monday’s) booking. So there followed a bunch of casting about that resulted in a second booking of the one we’ve still got lined up for Saturday night: Nokka. They were open and could take us at short notice, and turned out to be totally lovely. I’m really looking forward to Saturday night, now. Since Nokka was around by the waterfront we also got some interesting first-night photos from the walk over.
This morning I discovered that per hotel-standard our current digs doesn’t have anything beyond over-brewed filter coffee for breakfast. More alarmingly, Google maps thought that the closest cafe/coffee shops were at least fifteen or twenty minutes walk away. Thankfully, this turned out to be another of Google’s data-rot answers: a perfectly serviceable coffee shop was less than 200m away, in the market-hall that we were planning to head to anyway, along with at least three others, should we have needed the choice. So there’s that.
Properly coffeed-up and with a korvapuusti (cinnamon knot-roll, Finnish version) between us we continued through the market hall. I was taking photos of some local products when the proprietor asked if I was shooting film (my little Fujifilm, with the Voigtlander 27mm is a very compact camera that fits neatly into my coat pocket). I explained no, but in the process she managed to persuade me to go ahead and try the sandwich of bear terrine that I was looking at. OK, so now I’ve eaten bear. Hadn’t planned to. Don’t plan to in the future. Wasn’t terrible. Quite a mild flavour, for dark meat: not even as strong as lamb. Served with lingonberry and parsley on dark rye.
From the market hall we continued along the waterfront to a large jetty structure where we took lots of photographs of boats and the waterfront buildings as the sun set. Very pretty.
Did I mention that everything was lightly dusted with snow? The first snow covering that we’ve come across on this trip (it had snowed previously in Berlin, Göteborg and Trondheim, but in all those cases it had subsequently rained heavily enough to melt it away). Very pretty, and nicer to walk on than ice. The Scandinavian countries spread gravel over the streets and footpaths for grip, so we haven’t needed crampons yet.
Just back from a very nice dinner, and blogging before bed. The dinner was particularly notable because half way through we were serenaded by a female Christmas carol choir who had clearly been engaged by the large Christmas party in the main dining room. They were excellent too. Their set included the theme from Skyfall: a new addition to the canon that fit very well. I might watch that now, in bed…
Here are some pictures:
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